So, after months of not going on any dates whatsoever or meeting anyone I was remotely interested in, I went on three dates with this really, really awesome guy. He was smart, he was creative. As soon as he sat down next to me at the bar, we had fantastic chemistry.

Yesterday, I drafted this post about how I blow everything by coming on too strong, and being insane.

Here’s what I did:

On Thursday, I had a complete freak-out about how intense and overwhelming this past week had been. Like, in four days, I went from someone who liked to write shit, to someone who was getting published in the NYT. People started asking for my business card. I bought a website. In four days. I was absolutely high on the excitement, but it inevitably got overwhelming.

So I called my dad and cried on the phone with him for 45 minutes. Then I texted this guy to ask if he thought he was too busy to be dating someone, because I knew that, in relationships, I’d want to see someone more than once a week. This was, obviously, part of the freak out. Sabotage.

His response was, “Very good question.” He explained that he didn’t want to do what he usually did, which was spend time with someone he liked to the exclusion of his responsibilities. I said I totally understood. Then I got super, super wasted on a lot of whiskey.

Then I sent eight texts asking him to call me. And called him eight times. The next morning, I apologized. He said he assumed I was drunk and would text when he got to work. He didn’t. I texted four more times. One was a long explanation about how I was sorry and how the week had been overwhelming and I flipped out. He wrote a long, very nice response in which he said he understood anxiety, he’d had a rough week, too. We had a nice little interaction. Which should have been where I stopped.

Then I sent more texts. Seriously. My phone said he hadn’t read them. So who knows. He had warned me that he would be busy this weekend. But two days went by with no response, after we had been texting hourly for a week and a half. At this point, I had sent six texts to him with no responses in between.

So, yeah.

The most frustrating thing is that I know I do this. I know I shouldn’t do shit like text a billion times in a row. I know I come on too strong and fuck things up. But I can’t seem to help it.

And, yes. Navigating interpersonal relationships is tough for me. Impulse control is also tough for me. I also get anxious about being bad at those things, which makes everything worse. I kinda wanna point out BPD in the DSM-V to everyone I meet and be like “This is me! See! It’s not my fault! There’s a reason I’m bad at this!”

And it felt fucking shitty. It feels shitty every time I do this, but it felt especially shitty since this was one of the few people I’ve actually been into in years. I was absolutely, positively sure I had blown it.

BUT WAIT!!!

This guy actually texted me back last night. As happy to talk to me as he had always been. He had actually just been busy all weekend. And he asked to hang out on Tuesday.

Dude seems entirely unfazed by my particular brand of crazy. Which is intense. Like, I know it is. I don’t know if I could tolerate me, if I were dating me.

So, even if this goes nowhere, which I hope it doesn’t, it’s encouraging to know that there’s someone cool out there who isn’t terrified by me being a crazy person. Who I don’t blow it with by doing the things that are really hard for me to avoid.